GM Jim Hendry said he doesn’t feel vindicated, though the Cubs’ regular season success has quieted critics who held him responsible for the failures of 2005 and ’06. Hendry said he deserved “to take some hits.” “We had a bad team last year,” he said. “We thought we did a good job of shuffling the deck, fixing it in a hurry and also getting it ready for the future. But it still takes time for it to fall in place.
– Brandon Webb had a good laugh, a long one, when asked about the difference between him and Carlos Zambrano. “He’s pretty flamboyant,” Webb finally said in his deliberate, son-of-the-South drawl. But besides the prolonged chuckle, Webb wasn’t biting on any other comparisons between starting pitchers for Game 1 of the NL Division Series on Wednesday at Chase Field. “He’s a great pitcher and he’s had a great year,” Webb said. “I expect it to be a good ballgame.”
– Only a handful of the current Cubs were around during the Game 6 collapse in the 2003 National League Championship Series, but everyone knows the legend of the foul ball and the eight-run eighth inning that sent the Cubs into a downward spiral from which they could not recover. “Don’t even ask,” Scott Eyre said. “I wasn’t even here when any of that happened. Nobody was, except maybe Kerry (Wood) and maybe Will (Ohman). No one wants to talk about it.
